Why Every Restaurant POS Should Integrate with an Accounts Payable System

In an industry that’s increasingly dominated by digital processing, it’s essential that spending, invoice management, and accounts payable processes are streamlined. In fact, failing to integrate your restaurant POS and accounts payable automation systems can be frustrating, costly, and time consuming for both your restaurant and its employees.

Fortunately, industry-leading technology has made it easier than ever to integrate these two essential restaurant tools. Here’s why such an integration matters to your bottom line—and how it can benefit your restaurant for years to come.

Track Pricing Changes

As pointed out by a 2018 report by the USDA, the consumer price index for food rose 0.2% from February to March. This shows that food prices are constantly changing, and failing to stay updated with such changes can result in inaccurate invoicing and lost capital.

The good news is that when your restaurant POS system integrates with your invoice processing software, you can see these changes in real time and respond accordingly.

With Plate IQ and Breadcrumb's restaurant POS, for example, restaurants get instant access to Hot List price alerts. In turn, they can instantly tweak and recalculate pricing and spending to ensure that their numbers are always optimized and their restaurant POS is always updated.

Automate Invoice Processing (and Save Time)

In the digital age, there’s neither time nor patience for manual data entry and invoicing. In addition to wasting precious time, managing invoices by hand simply isn’t as accurate as what modern invoicing tools can achieve. According to a report by Konica Minolta, the average cost to process a manual transaction is $16.33. In contrast, processing a transaction digitally reportedly costs just just $5.65—a sum that's even lower with Plate IQ—saving restaurants up to 65%.

Uniting your restaurant point of sale with accounts payable automation helps make invoice management more accurate, efficient, and cost effective.

Analyze Spending Across Categories

Changing food prices impact the cost and value of your menu items. When your POS app integrates with your AP tool, you can unite the most important information about sales and spending in one place.

Think about it this way: point of sale data showcases which menu items are selling the most—and even which ones are driving the most online ordering revenue. When you know what’s selling, and what it costs to keep dishing out those meals, you can make more informed decisions about what to keep serving and what to nix.

In turn, this integration will help you optimize your menu both for customer satisfaction and revenue.

Gain Powerful Insights Across Locations and Concepts

If you have multiple restaurant locations, manual invoice management can be a major hassle. How do you keep expenses separate? How can you tell which concepts are outperforming others?

Integrating your restaurant POS with your accounting system can help you gain powerful insights into all of your concepts. This is especially true with accounts payable automation software like Plate IQ, which is designed to accommodate owners and operators across multiple locations. That gives you the detailed insight you need to know where money is going and how to optimize your costs.

Wondering about everything that Plate IQ can do? Learn about all its features—and integrations—here.